Reclaimed genealogies: reconsidering the ancestor figure in African American women writers’ neo-slave narratives
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Date
25/11/2014Author
Milatovic, Maja
Metadata
Abstract
This thesis examines the ancestor figure in African American women writers’ neoslave
narratives. Drawing on black feminist, critical race and whiteness studies and
trauma theory, the thesis closely reads neo-slave narratives by Margaret Walker,
Octavia Butler, Gayl Jones, Toni Morrison and Phyllis Alesia Perry. The thesis aims
to reconsider the ancestor figure by extending the definition of the ancestor as
predecessor to include additional figurative and literal means used to invoke the
ancestral past of enslavement. The thesis argues that the diverse ancestral figures in
these novels demonstrate the prevailing effects of slavery on contemporary subjects,
attest to the difficulties of historicising past oppressions and challenge post-racial
discourses.
Chapter 1 analyses Margaret Walker’s historical novel Jubilee (1966),
identifying it as an important prerequisite for subsequent neo-slave narratives. The
chapter aims to offer a new reading of the novel by situating it within a black
feminist ideological framework. Taking into account the novel’s social and political
context, the chapter suggests that the ancestral figures or elderly members of the
slave community function as means of resistance, access to personal and collective
history and contribute to the self-constitution of the protagonist. The chapter
concludes by suggesting that Walker’s novel fulfils a politically engaged function of
inscribing the black female subject into discussions on the legacy of slavery and
drawing attention to the particularity of black women’s experiences.
Chapter 2 examines Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1978), featuring a
contemporary black woman’s return to the antebellum past and her discovery of a
white slaveholding ancestor. The chapter introduces the term “displacement” to
explore the transformative effects of shifting positionalities and destabilisation of
contemporary frames of reference. The chapter suggests that the novel challenges
idealised portrayals of a slave community and expresses scepticism regarding its own
premise of fictionally reimagining slavery. With its inconclusive ending, Kindred
ultimately illustrates how whiteness and dominant versions of history prevail in the
seemingly progressive present.
Chapter 3 discusses Gayl Jones’ Corregidora (1975) and its subversion of
the matrilineal model of tradition by reading the maternal ancestor’s narrative as
oppressive, limiting and psychologically burdening. The chapter introduces the term
“ancestral subtext” in order to identify the ways in which ancestral narratives of
enslavement serve as subtexts to the descendants’ lives and constrict their
subjectivities. The chapter argues that the ancestral subtexts frame contemporary
practices, inform the notion of selfhood and attest to the reproduction of past
violence in the present.
Chapter 4 deals with Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) and Phyllis Alesia
Perry’s Stigmata (1998) exploring complex ancestral figures as survivors of the
Middle Passage and their connection to Africa as an affective site of identity
reclamation. The chapter identifies the role the quilt, the skill of quilting and their
metaphorical potential as symbolic means of communicating ancestral trauma and
conveying multivoiced “ancestral articulations”. The chapter suggests that the project
of healing and recovering the self in relation to ancestral enslavement are premised
on re-connecting with African cultural contexts and an intergenerational exchange of
the culturally specific skill of quilting.